Massive machinery goes through the coal mining process at the Luminant owned Oak Hill coal mine in Rusk county.The extraction of the coal is a fairly rapid operation and once completed the company goes through the more involved procedure of "reclaiming" the land and replanting it with trees and native vegeation that in turn attract fauna to repopulate the area.Photo: Jaime R. Carrero/Tyler Morning Telegraph

1. How fast is coal production in the U.S. declining?
2. Unemployed W. Va. coal worker confronts Hillary Clinton over her plan to put coal ‘out of business’
3. Fight over government involvement in solar power impacting Arizona elections

Americans are a war-weary lot these days, but presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders pledge to continue the war on coal if they’re elected. What’s at stake is the world’s most reliable and reasonably-priced power.

There’s simply no way that renewable forms of energy – solar and wind – can take up the slack if more coal-fired power plants are taken off line, and more coal companies are forced into bankruptcy.

Appearing at a CNN townhall meeting, Mrs. Clinton said she will continue President Barack Obama’s assault on the coal industry.

“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country – because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” she said.

Perhaps realizing she just threatened the jobs of thousands of voters, she quickly added, “And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives, to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now, we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

For his part, Sanders is also an enemy of coal.

“It’s time for a political revolution that takes on the fossil fuel billionaires, accelerates our transition to clean energy and finally puts people before the profits of polluters,” he said.

Here’s the problem with those plans. First, there’s just not enough solar and wind capacity to replace coal.

“Even after a decade of rampant growth solar energy still barely moves the needle in the U.S. energy mix,” Forbes magazine reports. “In fact, solar merely equals the amount of electricity that the nation generates by burning natural gas captured from landfills.”

Nor can wind energy fill the gap. Besides being unreliable, wind energy is expensive.

In fact, a Brookings Institute study found that “more than six solar plants and four wind plants are required to produce the same output with the same degree of reliability as a coal-fired plant of the same capacity.”

And the war on coal makes no economic sense.

As Michael Grunwald reported for Politico magazine: “The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.”

Finally, Mrs. Clinton is wrong about those workers “losing their health.”

As Thomas Lifson wrote in American Thinker, “It is fashionable for liberals to assume that today’s coal miners are all suffering from black lung disease.”

That’s not true anymore; coal is safer – and cleaner – than ever.

The war on coal must be ended, because it’s really a war on the economy.